Pod Save America - Elon Musk's Nerd Coup

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

With Donald Trump's blessing, Elon Musk and a small crew of inexperienced software engineers take near full control of the government, moving to shut down USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and taking control of a critical payment system at the Treasury Department. Trump delays his trade war with Canada and Mexico by a month after securing minor concessions that were probably already in the works. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats begin to push back harder—though whether it'll be enough is still an open question. Jon, Lovett, and Tommy break down all the latest, and Lovett speaks with former Obama and Biden economic adviser Brian Deese about just how bad things could get if a real trade war kicks off over the next four years.

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60-day satisfaction guarantee or your money back. Simply Safe is named best home security systems by US News and World Report five years in a row Visit simply safe comm slash crooked to claim 50% off a new system with a professional monitoring plan and your first month free That's simply safe comm slash crooked because there's no safe like simply safe Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, we got Donald Trump and Elon Musk seizing control of the federal government's money spigot, accessing all of our private information like social security numbers,

purging federal law enforcement of nonpartisan FBI agents and prosecutors who aren't loyal to Trump, and shutting down multi-billion dollar agencies that they're not legally authorized to eliminate, starting with USAID. We'll hear from a USAID vet about what is actually happening and what it means. We'll also talk about the Democrats who seem like they're trying to get off the mat. Over the weekend the party elected Ken Martin as its new chair and Democrats in Congress are starting to use the limited power they have to fight back. And later, Love It

Talks tariffs with our old friend Brian Deese, who is a top economic advisor to Presidents Obama and Biden. But first, America's dumbest trade war with two of its closest allies and biggest trading partners seems to have ended before it even began. We started today ready to talk about a trade war and then just before we started recording first Mexico's goes down then Canada goes down trade war is over if you want it so over the weekend Trump announced 10 percent tariffs on Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on goods from our toughest adversaries Canada and Mexico that would mean every time a US company imports products from those countries food cars medicine electronics they would have to pay an extra tax to the US government every time a US company imports products from those countries, food, cars, medicine,

electronics, they would have to pay an extra tax to the US government and then most companies would make up for the added expense by raising the prices they charge American consumers. The tariffs were scheduled to go into effect on Tuesday night but then Trump agreed to last-minute deals with both Canada and Mexico to pause tariffs for one month. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum agreed to send 10,000 additional troops to the border to help with illegal immigration and drug smuggling, which Mexico also did at the beginning of Joe Biden's administration.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada would implement the $1.3 billion border plan that it had already announced in December, launch a Canada-US joint strike force to fight drug smuggling and money laundering, which it also announced in December, and the new thing, appoint a fentanyl czar, a Canadian fentanyl czar. That guy's always late for work. Thank God. As far as we know, as of this recording on Monday afternoon, the tariffs on China are still going into effect as planned, though we're keeping a close eye on Xi Jinping's

Twitter feed. Just got to keep a close eye on that while we're recording. Now why was Trump doing all this in the first place? Here's a sampling of the explanations he's offered over the last few days, including threats to start trade wars with our European allies as well. We put tariffs on, they owe us a lot of money, and I'm sure they're going to pay. UK is out of line, but I'm sure that one, I think that one can be worked out. But the European Union is, it's an atrocity.

We may have short-term, some little pain, and people understand that. Canada's been very abusive of the United States for many years. What I'd like to see, Canada become our 51st state. As a state, it's different. As a state, it's much different. And there are no tariffs. So I'd love to see that, but some people say that would be a long shot.

Yeah, some people do say that's a long shot. He said something so bizarre right after that, which was if people were smart about the pain, they'd be for it, but they're not smart about the pain. He said something deeply, deeply troubling. Right after. That's unlike him. Right after. All right.

What do you guys think? Did Mexico and Canada cave to Trump's pressure and just his tough negotiating tactics or are these just fake concessions that just let everyone save face? Does that seem leading to you, that question? I think... I... I... It seems as though Trump really enjoyed beating the ever-loving shit out of the Colombians. And now he's like feeling tough

and he's ready to move up the chain... He's got a taste for it. ...of regional economies. And he's taking that quick victory out for a spin. Are we at like King Hippo if it's Mike Tyson Punch-Out? Where are we at in the escalation ladder? I always struggle. I never got the timing right.

I never got the timing right. Who's the first person? I always struggled. Glass Jog. I was terrible at that game. The drunk Russian. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah.

That sounds right. King Hippo. Yeah, I mean the fentanyl czar is gonna have some free time because I think USCBP had some data about seizures at the Northern border in 2022, 2023, and 2024. And they found 70 pounds of fentanyl at the northern border as compared to over 66,000 pounds at the southern border.

So I don't think the fentanyl issue was one with Canada as much as it was with Mexico and with China. Also, he said some number, I think he said like there were 200,000 fentanyl deaths, but the number is actually lower and had been dropping. And so he's already going to be able to declare that he's brought the number down the day, you know, he can already from his fake number. Here's so obviously, Trump thinks this is a big win. He'll get some coverage that says it's a win from from regime media.

And his people, his his supporters will all say it's a big win. Maybe some low info voters out there, if they're paying attention at all, will see headlines and think, oh, maybe Trump won. But as you heard in the clip, Trump's problems, at least his stated problems with Mexico and Canada, and especially Canada, is that they have abused us, they've treated us poorly economically. He's got all these economic concerns about both of them. He doesn't like the trade. He says that we don't even need Canada for all the stuff that we buy from them.

We can make it all here. This is ridiculous. And yet all he got from either of them were announcements about border security that they had already made or already implementing or had already implemented in the past without threats of a trade war. So I don't know what he got at all or what he's doing. There's a potential that as he tries to renegotiate trade deals with Canada and Mexico, because

he's going to open up the trade deal that he himself negotiated with them last time, that maybe he'll try to bring up some of these issues again. You know, he's upset about a trade deficit, I guess. But I don't know, I don't think he got anything. Yeah, there was a moment, he did yet another press availability from the Oval this morning, sort of his daily ritual at this point. And he said, who the hell negotiated these deals?

You did! Jared Kushner did. We're in your deals. These are all part of your deal. Yeah, it's hard to, it's like, you know, we've just been in this endless, we were right before recording, so I was like, I wonder what's Trump's,

Trump is thinking about this, which is always just sort of a fool's errand to try to figure out, so you never know. Like is this- The one that we face much of the show around. And that's the contradiction at the heart of this show. But it's, are we like, and I think there's always a mix, right, between his sort of feral desire for just new cycles, right?

He's just, he's ravenous for new cycles and he's, he got a great one out of Columbia. He's gonna declare that this was a great, he feels this is a great one for him, right? He threatens these tariffs. The media goes nuts. He gets these concessions that he can brag about declare victory. And we're onto the next fight tomorrow.

But then part of it also is he is, this is now a cycle, right? He has said, I will tariff you unless you come to the table and negotiate. Right. They can, he's showing that, you know, they, they never apply this on, uh, on sanctions, but they do on, on tariffs, which is the way you prove that, that if you concede something, you might be rewarded by Trump is he withdrew them, right? He's showing he's is he's willing to be capricious and put in place these disastrous terrorists that would harm both countries. But he's also willing at a moment's notice to withdraw them. So it's he's setting. Now

we have a 30 day cycle. We're gonna do this again in 30 days, I guess. Yeah, I think just it's gonna be a lot easier to get either real concessions or just lip service of the Canadians and the Mexicans than it will be out of the Chinese. Xi Jinping is not going to bend or break easily. And so it does look like, look ultimately I think the results matter a lot less to Trump than the politics. There were stories in the Wall Street Journal a week ago about how the Canadians like didn't know what he wanted. They were on the other end of this fight. They didn't know what they were negotiating over. Turns out the answer was a fentanyl czar.

Yeah, they wanted a new czar. But like Trump looks like he's taking action, he's getting stuff done, he's making progress. He's picking big fights. So it's splashy, it's getting covered. You're right, state media is covering it, but so is every other news outlet that's trying to follow this administration. So I think it's really smart politics for him. I think though that you just have to ask yourself like Justin Trudeau and Claudia

Schoenbaum right now, what are they thinking? Are they thinking, oh he really got us? No, probably not because they didn't have to give up anything. Well Trudeau's out of a job so he's thinking, where can I go? Right, but it's not like, sure everyone can say whatever they want and he can say whatever you want about how he pulled one over on people But like the two the two people the two countries He supposedly pulled one over on are probably pretty happy right now because there's no trade war and they didn't have to Spend any more money than they were going to I was um I clicked on over to click on over on over to CNBC to see What those guys were up to I don't really check in with them very much. How they do it was a great day

They're there every day, you know, which is crazy But yeah, Jim Jim Kramer this morning said he was upset really bad and it's gonna be a really long bad day Well, you know what you do with the Jim Kramer prediction bet the other side almost exclusively but but they had the oil industry types on to talk about What they thought about all of a sudden they were all being very very careful not to say anything to offend mr Trump but they talked about how they had negotiated, basically from their own pressure, they had pushed for Trump to lower the tariffs on oil.

So it's, why is he doing that? Well, he's facing, the lobbyists are getting through, which is just a reminder, by the way, that tariffs are a great mechanism for Trump, not just to have new cycles, but to keep American industries in heel. But you say it's like a, you know, I'm sure they're relieved that these tariffs aren't going into effect, but like the auto industry that is incredibly interdependent is jeopardized

by the threat of these looming tariffs that will hang over these companies for months to come. Based on these free trade agreements, build a whole bunch of interdependent industries, oil refineries and all the rest that depend on the United States not being a malicious actor that suddenly on a dime decides they're going to throw a giant tariff on our closest neighbor. And so like, yeah, like we're on the other side of this right now, but the threat is still there. And Trump knows that the prospective threat of tariffs is more useful to him than ever implementing them

Sure, but I don't know how you get out of a cycle where people start to decide the United States is not worth doing business with Right. No. No, I think I think the whole thing is damaging for sure Yeah Damaging to us probably as people want to do business with us because at some point someone's gonna say well I'm gonna call this bluff because so far far all he does for his first term and now this term is he threatens and then maybe he slaps a small tariff on something or targeted tariffs here, but it's not really a big deal. I also think that there was this whole debate, is he using the tariffs as a negotiating threat or does he just really believe that tariffs are good?

And by nominating and then confirming Scott Besson for Treasury Secretary, he seemed to be of the view that tariffs are just a good negotiating tactic. But then of course over the weekend when it seemed like it was going to happen, all of the MAGA people are all arguing Trump's point that tariffs are actually great and this is, you know, Trump himself posted, we should get rid of the income tax and just have tariffs and these tariffs are going to fill our coffers and we're going to have so much more money and we're going to show these countries blah blah blah. And it's like, well, what happened to that now? Well, yeah, the JD Vance here, the case is you throw in the tariffs and you create a

big domestic industry. But these are all long game proposals that will take decades to play out. And Trump's just sticking around and doing a political move like it's clearly just naked politics he wants to look like he's taking action I think it's pretty effective in that sense yeah I talked about this with these briefly but like I when I woke up I was like let's see what's happening with this trade war and I just checked the Dow I don't know I checked the Dow in the morning about a Dow checking guy but then you look and it's like the the the people that are you know so keyed into this are not that

afraid right it like went down a little, then they saw the Mexican deal, and it kind of ticked back up again. So they all, there was a kind of collective belief that at the moment, in the morning, I was like, it is either a delusion or not, that this Trump is just bluffing. He doesn't actually want to do this. But Trump is so emboldened and gained so much power

from the fact that we don't totally know what he'll do, and we're not really sure what he means. And we pay for that. We pay for that by the fact that we don't totally know what he'll do, and we're not really sure what he means. And like, we pay for that. We pay for that by the fact that the whole world today was focused on whether it was going to happen today. Yeah. I also don't... I don't really understand... I know how he thinks about it, but I don't really understand what kind of political win he thinks he's getting two weeks into his administration in one new cycle.

It's like, great. Everyone's going to forget about it in, you know, three days until we get... unless we get 30 days from now and then, you know, he makes up some other big fucking problem that Canada and Mexico are doing. He does this all over again. Yeah. I just think it's like the casual news observer, the just the headline person. Like, ah, you see what Trump, he beat up on the Canadians. He got some concessions. Like good for him doing stuff. Pod Save America is brought to you by Helix. We love Helix mattresses, love it has a Helix mattress.

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plus two free dream pillows with mattress purchase. Helixsleep.com slash crooked. All right, let's talk about Trump's war at home against the government he leads. The president has essentially given Elon Musk the keys to the kingdom and the world's richest man is now acting like he's the one people voted for. Here's the headline from the Libs over at the Wall Street Journal. Musk moves with lightning speed to exert control over the government. Elon and his gang of Gen Z doge bros, got a couple of 19, 20, 21 year olds,

right out of college, fresh out of college, now they are just running around the federal government. Jesse, who was in the Oval Office today. Oh yeah. Rupert Murdoch. And Larry Ellison. Well Rupert, so during the press avail, they asked Trump about the Wall Street Journal saying

that this was Trump's dumbest trade war. He didn't love that. And he didn't like it. He said he's going to have to bring that up with Rupert. And I guess he really meant it that day. Rupert was sitting right there with a question with us. Yeah. Oh, we didn't talk about that.

I did wonder if some of the market stuff and Rupert and Wall Street Journal and the old establishment Republicans that basically no longer exist started getting him like hey the markets could be fucked here well this was the whole thing the whole first term his China policy was flip-flopping back and forth between hardline hawks and the market whisperers like Mnuchin and others who were saying don't do it you don't want to doubt to go down you want the S&P to drop so anyway so Elon and all of his fucking nerds, they're running throughout the federal

government now. They demanded and ultimately won access to the Treasury Department's payment system, which is how the government pays its bills and delivers benefits to people that are already mandated by law. So by the time it gets to the payment system, it's all a bunch of career officials. They're nonpartisan. They're just like, it's just the spigot. They're just turning it on. All right. Now we're just paying the bills. So now this means that Elon and his crew has access to the personal information of every US taxpayer, social security numbers, all

of it. Elon then claimed without any evidence whatsoever that Treasury, he discovered that Treasury was making illegal payments, including to some terrorists, and that he was shutting them down. Seems bad. What's your level of alarm on this one, guys? Presumably, we're mailing the checks to those terrorists, so probably see that address go there. Yeah. Uncle Sam's Venmo. Do we have the ISIS account? I just sort of like seems like that's like a you're kind of over promising and yeah and under delivering if you found terrorists in the payment System, let's see where the checks are. I meant hummus not Hamas How do we route that money in the wrong place? You know, who are we sending hummus to? No, it was payment for

We split that app. It's where I was hummus for Hamas, unfortunately, and condoms. Which was just made up and you said it again. Yeah. Anyway, this is pretty, first of all, I didn't know that Uncle Sam had a Venmo. This seems alarming and unprecedented. Like Elon Musk is an unelected tech billionaire wrestling away congressional authority to spend money in the Treasury Department's role in the whole process. And I don't know, like this vindictive, unstable man calling USAID evil and leftist Marxists

terrorist supporters. This all seems like a pretty bad setup. I forgot to mention that when they originally demanded access, they were told no by the career official in charge of the payment system at Treasury who was acting Treasury Secretary at the time before Besant was confirmed and had been appointed, I believe, by Donald Trump in the first administration. This is no crazy Marxist lib. He said, no, that's crazy.

You can't have access to the pain system. This group of kids that you brought in from Silicon Valley, they're not even government employees and they don't have access to the pain system. You're not like this group of kids that you brought in from Silicon Valley. They're not even government employees and they don't have security. No emails. No, we're not giving you access to the sensitive payment system that distributes trillions of dollars every year.

And then he had to step aside. They got him right out of there. It's also, you know, it's like a, it's obviously like the most sort of sensational example. But it's also just, if your goal is getting government spending under control, obviously this is dangerous and unhinged. It's also very stupid. Because if you're trying to get overall government spending under control, I don't care how many 19-year-olds you brought with you from Doge,

I don't care how many fucking sofa beds you bring into the OMB, you're going line by line through the fucking ledger. Like, this is a vast apparatus. There are... But also, it's the wrong ledger. You didn't need access to the payment system. There's the federal budget that you could just go line by line through. But that's my point. These people have so little knowledge or respect.

I wanna get to the danger that this poses, the moral and ethical risks that this poses. But let's just start by pointing out this is a stupid thing to do. This is a stupid way to try to achieve what they wanna achieve because it is not actually about results. It's about being the stars of a drama, the drama of reforming the government from the

inside with our daybeds and our doge and our hardcore and our emails and our exciting, exciting progress. And that to me is driving all of this, not the actual practical realities of what anything made on their own terms what they want to do. Well, but that that's the key on their own terms. It's if if what they want to do really is cut spending in the government and that's it. Then if the whole thing is really stupid and they're going about it the wrong way. But maybe that's not what they really want to do and that's why they tried to get access to the payment system in the US government. And where the shit really hits the fan is we're gonna go into a probably a debt ceiling crisis in March and when they're trying to raise the debt ceiling and Treasury already is using extraordinary measures

to keep us from hitting the debt ceiling because we should have raised it, as always, we're raising it late as we have for the last two decades. And Treasury and that department are responsible for making sure that the US keeps paying our bills and that the full faith and credit of the United States government is respected and counted on all over the world. Also, apparently, even in past financial crisis or debt ceiling fights, the political staff have never done this. They've always let career civil servants handle this kind of sensitive information. By the way, there was some reporting about the identities of members of the Doge team,

these tweens and teens running around the place. And then a tweens. You don't know that. No. I like calling them tweens, you don't know that. You don't know that there were tweens. I like calling them tweens. Now the US attorney for the District of Columbia is threatening to arrest people or prosecute people that I guess expose their identities or put them at risk in some kind of way. And now you've got like Elon's army of dipshits and losers on Twitter now doxing the reporters

who reported on the Doge staffers and in leading them getting threats. So this is just incredibly feshistic. The US attorney for DC who now, who used to be the guy who defended all the January 6 rioters. He was now made the US attorney in DC. So much of this too, like it's Trump, how Trump is threatening tariffs, uh, how Elon is operating, uh, Doge is all kind of childish, kind of buffoonish

people drafting off the, the like stability and success and institutions that they don't respect at all. Like Elon and this group of people people they don't care or know Why we make why we did things the way we did for a real long time They don't know or care why we had these independent parts of the government They don't haven't thought deeply about why it's actually a very good thing that when the Treasury says hey We have four months until we're out of money that both Democrats and Republicans that are negotiating over spending in Congress respect that and more broadly They don't respect that like yeah cutting the budget finding waste and fraud

like these are time consuming and difficult projects that require audits and negotiation and compromise that are slow and annoying and frustrating and imperfect like they don't respect or care about that process at all it's not hardcore it's not how they do it in business because they don't understand the value of like democratic legitimacy. They don't appreciate or care about these institutions and the fact that they belong not to like Elon or Trump, but they belong to us. And that basic lack of respect, that like humility is, is, is, it's just absent. It's absent. And I know it like kind of almost goes without saying, but I think it's worth saying.

Well, yeah. And cause billionaire tech founders don't run their businesses like a democracy. That's the whole point. They're like, they're authoritarians in their own little fiefdoms. And they look at the federal government and they're like, oh, it's so wasteful and inefficient. And why can't they just run? Why can't the person in charge just make all the make all the calls there too? Oh, wait a minute. Right.

We tried that. We tried that. The system that we have here, democracy, this seems I don't know about this. And a lot of people thought it was stupid to do it the way we decided to try to do it. They're like, what do you mean you don't have one person making all the rules? Isn't that going to be messy? Yes. Yes. But it turns out it has some perks. When Besson found out about the whole thing, apparently, he told the journal, the Wall Street Journal or sources told the Wall Street Journal that they have only

read only access to the payment system and that they cannot cut off any payments themselves, which contradicts Elon's tweet where he said, we are stopping these payments immediately. So a little unclear what's going on there. Who knows what's going on? It changes hour to hour. We have no idea. Doge also busted into the USAID building this weekend.

That's the agency responsible for humanitarian assistance around the world. And they demanded access to classified information and personnel information. When USAID security officials resisted, they were put on leave. Elon then tweeted that USAID is an evil criminal organization, a vipers nest of radical left Marxists who hate America, and that it's time for the agency to die." This was quite a tweet spree Sunday. USAID's website and Twitter account were then taken down and staffers were locked out of the building and their email accounts, even staffers all over the world in some very dangerous

places could not access USAID contacts, their emails, nothing. Then on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that USAID would become part of the State Department and that he was now acting administrator. Trump also weighed in on all this insanity. Let's listen. Will it take an act of Congress to do away with USAID?

I don't know, I don't think so. Not when it comes to fraud. If there's fraud, these people are lunatics. And if it comes to fraud, you wouldn't have an active Congress. And I'm not sure that you would anyway. I love the concept, but they turn out to be radical left lunatics. And the concept of it is good, but it's all about the people.

It's interesting that he says he loves the concept there. I don't think you do. Of course, you do need a law passed by Congress to completely defund and eliminate an agency. Anyway, it's obviously not how the people who actually work at USAID see it the way that Elon sees it. We talked to Brittany Brown, who was a former division head at USAID right after she got back from her protest outside the agency's headquarters in D.C. on Monday. Let's listen to Brittany.

I'm Brittany Brown. I was at USAID for four years, starting the second week of the Biden administration, and I stayed through January 20th at noon of this year. So about 10 days ago, what happened was they put a stop work order on all U.S. foreign assistance and that impacted about $60 billion of assistance. I think we've seen now in the last three days that it really is an attempt to shut down the US Agency for International Development or USAID.

What is really important about this versus just like a pause on assistance is they didn't just stop new money from going out the door. The thing that's like really scary to me is the guy who is in charge of holding together the humanitarian portion of the ceasefire with Israel in Gaza. He cannot access his email or computer. He's the one who's supposed to be like actually making sure the humanitarian portion of that is working and he can't get into his email.

The woman who is running the humanitarian response in Sudan, where we just declared a genocide, she can't access her email or get into her systems to try and move money, to try and move commodities so that we actually can support the people who are now, you know, without any international support. These are all people that I know. I spent the first seven months of the first Trump administration at the Trump White House as Trump's senior Africa person and I saw firsthand that things were rarely

what they said they were and that is why I feel so panicked about what they're saying versus what is happening. I think this is a test to see is Congress actually going to stand up for their right and for something that the constitution protects. USAID is a really safe organization to test this with. It is difficult to explain to the average American why spending $60 billion overseas makes sense. It's not like the people in Wisconsin are concerned about what is happening necessarily in Somaliland or in Eswatini. Like they're

thinking about Wisconsin. So it seems to me again that if President Trump and Elon Musk wanted to root out wasteful spending at USAID they could have just conducted an audit of the agency's budget and then asked their Republican controlled Congress to make a bunch of cuts. Clearly that's not what happened. Tommy, what do you think is going on here and how big of a deal is this? I think that this is not about wasteful spending or even about USAID. I think this is a broader effort to usurp Congress's role in the spending process and

create a precedent that they can then use again and again. Just to be clear, the president does not have the legal authority to abolish USAID. Congress established USAID's authority apart from state and merging it with state would also be unconstitutional. So this is just a power grab and I think how it goes could determine whether there's another power grab. You're seeing some reporting that the Department of Education could be next. That's the thing in Elon's crosshairs. And it is part of a broader pattern that we're seeing in these first two weeks of them ignoring or breaking the law, ignoring norms to seize power.

So they fired those inspectors general at all these agencies. They did it illegally by not giving Congress sufficient notice. It would have been very easy to give Congress 30 days notice and then fire all these agencies. They did it illegally by not giving Congress sufficient notice. It would have been very easy to give Congress 30 days notice and then fire all these people. The Republicans wouldn't stop them. They wanted to have this fight and maybe take it to courts and win in court. They have crippled the National Labor Relations Board by firing a member. So now the NLRB doesn't have enough members to meet, so they don't have a quorum. That means in practice, this independent agency that is supposed to investigate and prosecute labor law violations cannot do its job.

Similar thing happened at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC. They are brow-beating Republican senators into supporting unqualified nominees. This is a massive, unprecedented power grab. Democrats, I think, don't really know how to fight it or don't have the power to fight it. And Republicans just refuse to. And you said maybe they're looking for a fight that they can take to court and win. The thing that has been keeping me up at night for months is that they go to court with some

of these fights and then they lose. And then Donald Trump says, fuck you, John Roberts and the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, what are you going to do about it? And I think that this was corrupt and the justice system is wrong and I don't agree with them and I'm going to do what I want. Yeah. And then Bob Bauer, who was a White House counsel for the Obama administration and Jack Goldsmith, who was in the White House counsel for a Republican

administration, they both wrote this and they said that Russ Vought, who's going to head up OMB, like his view of the Constitution is that you should try to push the court and maybe defy court orders because you want or you want the court to give you favorable rulings because the court is afraid that if the court gives you gives Donald Trump like rulings that he doesn't like, then he'll say, fuck you. And then that'll be it. Right. That the court needs to balance its constitutional prerogative with the fear that Trump will break the rules. And so they negotiate, they negotiate against themselves, allowing Trump to be unconstrained without him ever having to break a rule. By the way, not dissimilar to what news agencies are doing when they capitulate to Trump on

lawsuits that they're afraid to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. There are two pieces of it that I think are worth splitting up. One is what they're doing around these firings or the National Labor Relations Board, in which they are basically asserting that any bounds on Trump and his ability to decide who works for him and where in the executive branch are unconstitutional, which is not a theory that Donald Trump invented. It's called the unitary executive theory. It proceeds him. desire for an imperial presidency incredibly dangerous in part because that ideological desire for an extremely powerful presidency is not just in what republicans in congress want or what previous republicans presidents want it's what the republican courts seem willing to go along with. The other part of this is the power of the purse and it is interesting that Trump, whether it is because they didn't want to have the

fight on this issue or they do think they would be constrained by a court ruling that they withdrew the federal funding freeze and were willing to kind of give on that, right? It points to the places in which they're still responding to kind of the old rules at least a little bit. At least that's maybe a glimmer of hope that they are. Well, one of the federal judges that tried to freeze the freeze and issued a restraining order said just today, Monday, that she doesn't believe that the Trump administration is abiding by the restraining order and ordered them again to stop the freeze. It also sounds like that OPM letter went through Elon's shop and did not go by people like

Stephen Miller and other top White House officials. So I'm sure there's some intra-administration stuff too. And they're just benefiting from chaos and incompetence, right? Bill Cassidy, Republican Senator, put out a letter today saying PEPFAR still seems to be on hold. Just PEPFAR was a Bush initiative, a Republican initiative, to spend vast amounts of money to combat HIV and AIDS in Africa. I remember when this was a debate at the time, Bush didn't like USAID.

And so he set it up separately because he wanted it to run through the State Department because of the previous Republican problems with USAID. That's still being held, even though they're claiming that these things have a waiver. But on the power of the purse, what Trump is doing here is he's basically saying, I have the latitude to turn off everything, and then by no bless oblige, turn it back on, right?

And I don't, like, we have spent a long time watching as the presidency kind of encroached upon Congress's prerogatives. Like that's something that was happening under Democrats and Republicans. And it's gotten complicated. And when Obama is president, a bunch of Democrats are defending certain things that now we would not defend. And Republicans are doing the same in Republican administrations. But this is as basic and core to the Constitution as it gets. If the President can decide what to spend or not to spend based on what Congress has passed, the Congress is no longer determining how the money is spent, the President is. That is one of the core dangers.

That is one of the core reasons we have a Constitution. And I agree with you, like my concern too is that they're going to obliterate, that they're going to bash through a court ruling at some point. I think the question is like, how long do we hold that off? Four years ago, what Elon Musk is doing, impossible to imagine. Eight years ago, impossible to imagine. Four years from now, I have no idea. It's also important that this isn't just about norms and institutions and theories of government

and all that, which is an incredible dangerous threats to the system of democracy. But like this is just causing needless suffering and death. Because again, if they, and you know, what they're gonna do is they're gonna, I'm sure come out with, you know, programs and spending at USAID that seem ridiculous or wasteful. They already have.

Again, there's probably plenty of that, right? And no one is saying we shouldn't go through the federal budget and go through the federal government and eliminate wasteful spending and try to find more efficiencies. But pausing it the way they did, cutting it off immediately, like people, children, what children are going to die because they can't get the medication they need in other countries for what? For nothing.

We're not going to save money for this this this is a you heard from Britney this is Money that was already out the door. This isn't new money So they're no one's saving this is just it's just you know There's I think there was guards prison guards that were guarding Isis prisoners just had to walk off the job well They weren't they didn't know if they should show up for work so some of them didn't there's there's USAID people in dangerous areas Around the world that now can't get access to help if they need it. All kinds of health programs we're funding around the world

that are just gonna just lead to more suffering and death. I mean, it's fucking ridiculous, it's inexcusable. I also think like there's this lack of clarity now about whether some parts of USAID funding has been unfrozen. Like Rubio said that, Secretary Rubio said that life-saving assistance like medicine, medical service, food and shelter would be exempted from the aid freeze, but no one really knows what that means.

Yeah. And I think that's kind of the point because this uncertainty has just upended everything USAID is doing. And I think, honestly, I think talking about this as a freeze is probably a mistake. I have zero confidence that the vast majority of this funding or these programs will be turned back on. And I think that, by the way, Rubio used to be a big defender of USAID funding. He said it was critical for our national security and now he's totally flip-flopped. But let's just say that something you're working on is paused for 90 days. If you're a contractor working for USAID in like Kenya or Ukraine or Southeast Asia, you don't have 90 days worth of savings to just sit on to like see

if your job is around in three months, like you're going to go do something else. And it's going to like completely cripple all this work that, you know, has taken decades to set up this infrastructure, these contractors, these networks of people in these countries. And to your point, I mean, if you're getting entry retrovirals through PEPFAR and you stop, you're going to die. And I get like, and I, and I get the domestic politics on all this. I get that no one likes foreign aid or not a lot. Most Americans don't like foreign aid and you tell people it's like 0.7% of the whole

budget and that still doesn't matter. They think it's 10% is the big problem. Yeah, that is a big problem. But I do think if you, I think for most Americans, you tell them, hey, this kid showed up at a clinic today, like they have every day for, you know, once a month to go get some medicine and now it shut down. And now this kid could die. Like for what?

When what for what purpose? So that Elon can post about like, vile communists, Marxists? It's, um, there's a... There's, like, a way in which their, kind of, base incompetence and then their, kind of, like, viciousness work together here. Which is, they didn't know or care very much about what USAID did. They didn't care very much or know very much about what PEPFAR did before. They have an ideological set of assumptions about nonprofit work, about foreign aid, that

it's all bullshit, right? They like internalized a bunch of that. I wonder if Elon Musk knew that USAID played such a big role in fighting apartheid in South Africa. Well, I mean, but the only just the point that I'm only making is that like the way in which these things work together is that they're so fucking careless. They're so, and like they're just careless people. It's so, it's a, it's a glib carelessness that is just like it's beneath contempt and

the stakes are so high. We're just, yes, there are many ideological kind of warriors, but a lot of the people at the top of this are just capricious, glib fools that don't understand that they just don't care that they're playing with matches. I hope, but in some instances it's worse than that. They are folding this into their preconceived ideological anger and they have decided that USAID funded programs that led to gain of function research that led to covid this is all kind of getting folded into like. Prosecute fauci madness and it's like you know the one musk retweeting at wall street apes which is his source on.

Someone found some forty million taxpayer funding that went to some scientists in wuhan and it's just like I don't know apparently this is all just part of a conspiracy theory about how the lab leak was on purpose from you know thanks to Fauci's funding from USAID I guess that's the new theory the case here. And again you have the richest man in the world with the one of the biggest platforms now one of the most powerful people in government, just accusing entire organizations of being criminal enterprises. And you can see the slippery slope, right? Like you can see where now, you know, Pam Bondi and Cash Patel get in there and they

start processing, well, this is criminal activity, we're going to investigate it. Like this is how it goes. Unless anyone thinks this is just about foreign aid, the Trump administration also pushed out the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Rohit Chopra, and ordered the agency to stop all investigations and enforcement actions against banks and payday lenders and credit card companies. They have saved just consumers billions and billions and billions of dollars in refunds and they've got to consumers.

It's a great agency is indefensible there is no simpler like the Delta between what Republicans claim that CFPB is and what CFPB is that is one of the biggest and starkest gaps in politics is an agency that has such a singular simple purpose which is to go after big corporations that are defrauding and fucking over consumers and getting the money back. It is being punished because it was originally Elizabeth Warren's idea. That's its original sin. But it is so fucking effective.

It is such good government. They put Mick Mulvaney in there the first term to try to destroy it. Biden was able to put in Rohit, who did an amazing job, and now they're going to try to destroy it again. Yeah. And as Tommy mentioned, Wall Street amazing job and now they're going to try to destroy it again. Yeah. And as Tommy mentioned, Wall Street Journal reports and now the Washington Post that Trump and Elon are preparing an executive order to try to shut down the entire Department of Education.

This was the campaign promise from Trump. They acknowledge in the order that they can't shut the entire thing down by executive order. They want to go to Congress to do it, but they want to move some of the functions out of the Department of Education. Of course, you know, most schools are funded by local and state taxes, but you know, for poor schools get a lot of Title I funding from the Department of Education. All of student financial aid, the federal financial aid program is run out of the Department of Education. Students with disabilities are funded through the

Department of Education. It goes on and on and on. The New York Times reports that more than 8,000 federal government web pages have been taken down, including thousands of research papers that were available on the CDC website, informational IRS videos about how to avoid tax penalties, and the state-level hate crimes data on the Justice Department website. Speaking of which, there is an ongoing purge at the DOJ and FBI. Trump is firing any prosecutors or FBI agents that had anything to do with any of the criminal investigations that led to his indictments. Well, in fairness, that's because they were also incredibly ineffective. Got to get some good prosecutors in that can get a fucking conviction and get them in jail. employees were given until 3 p.m. Eastern time on Monday to fill out a questionnaire about whether they were involved in any way in investigations into January 6th.

I did that. Such a funny trap to set for prosecutors. Like, hmm. Should I fire you? Y or N? Yeah. The FBI has estimated that the number of people who were agents and staff could be about 6,000. This comes after DOJ fired about 12 prosecutors in DC who had been brought on to investigate

January 6th cases. And most of the 6,000 are like so tangential. Yes. People who got random leads who passed along information or were part of a wiretap or God knows what. And by the way, that's the real concern is that so many of these people working or like career officials who've been at DOJ or the FBI for a decade. Some of them are very senior people with like counterintelligence experience and they're

going after national security threats and they've been working all these cases and now they're just going to be gone. Or they were just assigned a case and they don't have a choice. Right. Seasoned prosecutors who have no reason to be fired. And it's not as though America is short on white-collar crimes to prosecute so It's fucking terrible. So I mean you talked about the unitary executive theory, you know JD Vance tweeted today You know look

unelected bureaucrats Should not be Resisting the president states they work for him He gets to staff his government with who he wants, and then he is answerable to the people. So the people elected Trump, and Trump gets to have the entire government he wants, so everyone else should just shut the fuck up, basically. Why is that wrong?

You know, I was thinking about this earlier, which is just that we are watching these guys make these kind of simple arguments against these like hard-won institutional protections, right? Some of which are imposed by Congress, some are just norms that evolved over decades, if not centuries. And a lot of those norms, institutions, processes that are designed to constrain the executive were put in place in the kind of like long before the

internet and they were put in place when you had a kind of like elite bipartisan set of actors that didn't feel like they had that that that kind of established this order long ago and and it's sort of been in place in a way that was like never really defended right, we took no one really making the argument for Why the DOJ is separate from the presidency and why that's a good idea and why that's important There's no real there hasn't been a real kind of I don't know like legal broad-based kind of public legal argument against originalism and like kind of the values of the kind of what we've learned about constitutional governance over the last 200 years. But what we do have is just example after example after example of why we put these

restrictions in place and they were meant to stop presidents from abusing power. The reason we have bureaucrats who are not accountable to the president can't be fired by the president is because of the spoil system and because when the government was filled with cronies it didn't fucking work and it was a corrupt bargain. Why is the DOJ separate from the White House? Because the presidency is too powerful and when DOJ isn't separate from the White House it means the president is not accountable to law. There's an answer to everyone one of these questions but you know it's like we're there they're relying on the fact that we're like fighting these guys in every fucking

front and they can just spout off and say make these sort of claims to the power of the people. Well, we're left kind of falling behind. Well, actually there's a good reason. You know, RFK was actually an attorney general. I'm so sick of this. This is what people voted for line. Like, no, no one voted to give Elon Musk a line item veto for the entire federal government. And like voting for Donald Trump doesn't mean we get rid of basic civil service protections for government employees.

Those are in place to ensure merit-based employment, to ensure that political influence isn't dictating every single person who is hired or fired, that there isn't discrimination or arbitrary actions. They have collective bargaining rights, there's whistleblower protections, there's all sorts of workers' rights that don't go away because Donald Trump gets elected president. I do think that people don't necessarily love bureaucrats.

Even the name has a connotation that's not too positive. And I don't think, even during the campaign, we didn't want to talk a lot about Schedule F and how we wanted to replace all of the government workers with loyalists because we knew that wouldn't really pop in the polls. And I think that as he's doing all this, you know, those of us who are paying attention are rightly freaked out. I think what's going to have to happen is adverse consequences from having a government completely gutted and really good professional people who've been there forever and not there.

And like when something happens, it's going to have to be like, well, Donald Trump, it's your government. You and JD Vance said it's your people. You get to pick who you want. You're running the whole thing. You don't have the deep state to blame anymore. So it's your fucking fault. Yeah, they have to.

I don't know what else to. Yeah, there's just like, I don't know what the equity is and just a defense of the annoying, difficult, hard work of like democratic governance and like, you know, I think about like just the prospect of the trade war and it's like, it's not good TV, right? Like the like the difficult work of diplomacy behind the scenes to gain consensions without threatening your partners and without creating a scandal. Like it's just, it's just not good TV.

And like a lot of democracy. You're not sticking around for the readout of the bilat. Right. It was just like democracy has like what Trump figured out is that democracy isn't good TV. And like, I, I, I like it's incumbent on us to figure out how to make it more like good TV, but it's hard. It's hard.

Maybe, maybe next Democrat should try to take over Greenland, you know? Pots of America is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. According to research, a major challenge that many employers face is the pressure to hire quickly. And it's a tough hurdle to overcome because it's so time consuming to search for great candidates and sort through applications. Well, if you're an employer who can relate, I have one question for you. Have you tried ZipRecruiter? ZipRecruiter has figured out

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that was just, just drove me crazy. So Trump apparently ordered the army Corps of engineers to begin releasing water from two reservoirs in California's central Valley, because he mistakenly believes the water from the central Valley will flow three hours south to Los Angeles. I think people, I think people cause, cause south is down. Yeah. South is fucking down. I guess, guess what's supposed to you're supposed to Release the red the water from the reservoirs up there and then it'll flow right into the hydrants in the palisades, right? That's how it's gonna happen is the word Valley doing nothing for him

So he mistakenly believes it will flow down here to Los Angeles Helping us put out fires that are now a hundred percent contained in advance of an atmospheric river event That's predicted to dump ten feet of snow and up to 20 inches of rain in the area this week of the Central Valley where he where he just dumped out all that water. According to the Washington Post, Trump released enough water to supply as many as 7,000 households for a year and now that water won't be available to Central Valley farmers who really need it to irrigate the fields later this year. Trump talked about this quote, long fought victory at the White House on Monday. Let's listen.

All we're doing is giving Los Angeles and the entire state of California virtually unlimited water, which they could have done five years ago, which I told them they should do, but the environmentalists stopped them, and we opened it and we did it, regardless of the state. And now the state seems to be very happy. I spoke with Gavin Newsom and he's very happy. I almost called him by the other name. My little nickname for him. He stopped it.

He's being very presidential this morning. Just going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't think Gavin Newsom was probably too happy about this. It's so stupid. What the fuck, guys? He makes up a problem and he solves a problem. We're going to be living with that over and over again, but he doesn't care about the... Apparently, was it Padilla who was saying that he wanted to open it up even further

in a way that was extremely dangerous? Yeah, no. He wanted them to release a ton. They only gave the local officials hours notice. Usually when you do releases like that, you prepare with local officials and farmers and everyone else for many days to make sure there's no flooding. So they almost had to just open it up and cause a whole bunch of flooding. And then finally, last minute, they were like, can we just do a little less, sir,

because this is just for your fucking addled mind about water has nothing to do with anything. It's very Stalin being like, we'll double the wheat, if we plant all the wheat much closer together. You know? This is so fucking dumb. So fucking dumb.

Yeah. So the question again becomes, what are the Democrats up to? The good news is we're getting some signs of life from the opposition party. Democrats elected a new DNC chair over the weekend. We, of course, were supporting Ben Wickler, but a big congrats to Ken Martin, who we also interviewed and are very much rooting for. He's my enemy.

He's John's enemy. On Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries laid out a 10-part plan to fight back against Trump that includes using the March deadline to fund the government and lift the debt ceiling as leverage. Stay tuned for that. Our pal Brian Schatz, senator from Hawaii, says that he's placing a hold on all of Trump's State Department nominees until USAID is open and functioning again. And just a ton of congressional Democrats actually held a press conference outside USAID after trying to enter the building themselves.

Spoiler alert, they were not allowed in. Our sweet little insurrectionists. Oh, look at you guys doing your little insurrection. So sweet. Sweet little Democrats. Knock, knock, knock. What do you guys think? Democrats doing enough? Are they making the right moves? Doing a little extra reaction. So sweet. Sweet little Democrats. Knock, knock, knock. What do you guys think?

Are Democrats doing enough? Are they making the right moves? What else could they be doing? What's our latest feeling on this? I didn't love the USAID press conference setting. The reason being, as we just discussed, the Republicans are about to find a bunch of examples of USAID programs that seem silly even to us

or seem like a bad use of money. And if the shorthand is Democrats defend USAID while the White House bully pulpit and Elon's Twitter amplifies all these bad things about USAID, I don't think that's a winner. I want them to focus in on the Elon piece of this right now because I do think it's genuinely scary. It's a, he's a nefarious new element to Trump 2.0 that is newsworthy and he's the shiny object right now and reporters want to cover it and everyone knows who he is and want to know what's going on.

And there's been some recent polling that shows that Elon's favorable ratings are underwater. Something comes on cases by like 16 points. And I think Democrats should drive a wedge in between Elon and Trump and drive both their unfavorables up by talking about why an unelected billionaire is just kind of combing through the government books and doing whatever the hell he wants. Like that is a weird, crazy, interesting story that no one is going to like. And I think it'll get covered. And like I'm good for Brian Schatz for blocking all these State Department

employee nominations. I think that's great. H's 10-point plan has some good stuff in there I read through it all but I learned about it when I read the outline for this episode So I don't know that it's broken through I know a lot of it is like planning for down the road But I don't know I would focus on the Elon piece right now and just go go hard So Bernie Sanders put out a video over the weekend that I really liked. It was everything you want out of Bernie Sanders and I think like speaks to his sort of moral leadership. He just, it's just a camera. It's a very dangerous time. There

are three things we got to do. One, we got to accurately describe what's happening. Two, we need to find the short term and three, we need to find the long term. And in the short term, I think he was talking about what Tommy was talking about I think there's and the importance of fighting Trump wherever we can Ezra Klein made this point About sort of also just not taking Trump at his at his word, right? Like when he claims certain authorities we shouldn't concede to it Trump today He's trying to be scary and powerful. Yeah, he wants he wants everyone to see him as a strongman Trump today, uh, he's trying to be scary and powerful. Yeah. That's what he wants. He wants everyone to see him as a strong man. Trump today announced a sovereign wealth fund. He can't do that. Uh, he does not have the authority to create a sovereign wealth fund and we

shouldn't, uh, lend him, we shouldn't do what we're afraid that what, what legacy media companies are doing or what, uh, judges might be doing, which is because we assume Trump will break the rules to not uphold the rules, right? We should just uphold the rules. Uh, and, uh, uh. And then three, what Bernie talked about was building this long-term political power and making an argument for a positive vision. And look, I don't think it's revelatory, but just the kind of clean, simple, to the point, direct way talked about it, how serious this moment is, how dangerous it is without

hydrogen, without kind of theatrics, but just to camera explaining it I thought was really powerful. I along with you guys have yelled about Democrats needing to do more on this very show. Still think we haven't quite found our footing just yet but I do think just seeing a lot of people on Twitter and blue sky, you got to check the skeets too these days. I do not. Over the weekend. There's just, there was a lot of anger at the elected Democrats.

And I just, I think we should level set on what, how much power Democrats have right now, which is almost none. And that is just a consequence of the election. And we probably have less power now as a party than we have anytime I can remember. Because Trump's got the courts, he's got the executive branch, he's got billionaires all around them, they all own media platforms, like they have Congress, they have a lot of power. And Democrats can yell and scream. And, you know you know Tommy I had the same thought about the USAID press conference because of the politics but then I thought I'd

thinking to myself you know what we told them to go fight they're out there fighting it's it's it's an elections not in a couple months like let them do it for today you know they'll get used to it and then maybe they'll go to the Department of Education next maybe they'll go to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau next and they'll find more politically popular things to yell about. But I'm glad to see them do it. And Schatz is going to hold up these nominees, but everyone should realize with that too,

like that's going to eat up a lot of floor time and it's going to slow things down, which is great. But John Thune is going to be able to get those nominees through like Democrats Don't have the power. We have the power to slow things down in Congress We don't have the power to stop a lot of things We just don't and I think everyone should realize that and you know as we criticize Democrats Rightly for a lame tweet here or a lame speech there or whatever else

We should just know that you know, everyone should be suing the Trump administration on everything, the Democratic AG should be out there. We should take them to court on everything. That's a lever that we can pull. We can do everything. I do think like we're gonna have some leverage on funding and the debt ceiling because Mike Johnson is going to need

Democratic votes on those things. They're not gonna be able to get Chip Roy and all the Republicans to get together and vote to raise the debt ceiling and vote to this. So like that is a choke point for us. But there's not a lot more. There's just not a lot more. We have to win.

We have to win elections again, guys. Yeah. The part that I'm like a questioning that I find myself like feeling like unsure about is, you know, don't get distracted by USAID. We got to talk about the impact of terrorists and don't get distracted by the impact of terrorists. We got to talk about the impact of terrorists. And don't get distracted by the impact of terrorists. We got to talk about the oligarchs. And don't talk about the oligarchs. We've got to talk about the price of eggs.

And I like, and then I turn on the television and there's Trump every day for a couple hours a day just hitting whatever he's going to hit. He's talking about it all. Talking about it all. And you know, Trump declared that he was going to create a sovereign wealth fund, I mentioned, right? It is not, is barely news. It's barely news.

It's a big fucking deal. It's a big deal that the Trump is- It's not a bad idea. Well, I think it's a bad idea to have Trump basically create a kind of an administrative-led investment vehicle. I don't want him to have a slush fund, but the United States having a sovereign wealth fund, it's a conversation worth having. How else are we gonna buy our Chinese spyware out?

That's right. Nice, sure. Well, I don't, listen, I would rather put the money back in the hands of the American people, but that's just me. But all it's a way of saying, like maybe even that is kind of over thing at this point. Like fight everything everywhere, right?

You wanna fight USAID, fight USAID. Take some reps. Yeah, just- Get out there and take some reps. And you know, I want them to show passion. It was fake, because like a lot of people were making fun of Chuck Schumer because he had this series of tweets over the weekend

where he was like, you're going to watch the Super Bowl next weekend and beer is going to be more expensive. You're going to be trying to buy avocados and those are going to be more expensive. And like those were his tweets and everyone's like, there's a fucking emergency, Elon's breaking into USAID what are you doing and I'm like yeah Chuck Schumer's tweets are dumb.

There's an expectations management problem. But if like but if Chuck Schumer's tweets were amazing what would that have done? There's a funny moment where Schumer gave friends comments like I've never seen people more aroused than they are right now and everyone's like ah no he's saying they're aroused it's like who cares that's how Chuck Schumer talks. What's the difference? We played that on Pod Save America. It was really funny.

Yeah, I don't, I think we can critique it. We can make fun of that. No, for sure. But it's just sort of like- Arousal. They're also not going to become different people. Chuck Schumer is going to be a senior citizen Jewish New Yorker out there talking about

whatever he's going to talk about the way he's been talking about it for 50 fucking years. Look, we need them to, look, they need to step up. Like, good to do a press conference today. They've been slow. There's all these reports of the Democrats, the congressional Democrats doing a conference call to figure out their response as the news changes.

The OPM memo gets rescinded. Whatever, it's like be a little more nimble, take some shots, don't worry about the words being perfect. Make sure you try to get it to the people who need to hear it. Maybe don't use the word aroused. Maybe don't defend the most unpopular spending we do and defend some of the popular spending. But look, yeah, points for fighting, I guess.

Yeah, agree. Yeah, I totally agree with all of that. And I just, I just want everyone to know, like there is even if the Democratic Party was perfect and fucking nailed it every single day, there is a limit to what we can stop right now because we fucking lost the election. And we're gonna and you know, I said this because there's gonna be people like, oh now Democrats are just gonna tell us to vote for them in 2026? Yeah, yeah we are because that's the only way to stop legislation from happening. I took

Twitter off my phone again. I think it was good. I think it's good not to have that on my phone. Yeah, you don't want to get into the skeets. I'm not, I can't. I can't do it. I can't, I can't take it anymore. I do think everyone really needs to keep an eye on these media lawsuit settlements with Trump.

Yes. It's not just ABC and their defamation suit. It's not just Facebook and their $25 million. You call it whatever you want to Trump and to his library. There's reports that CBS might settle a suit that didn't even involve Donald Trump. The most ridiculous one. 60 minutes interview with Kamala Harris

that they edited like every news organization edits everything always and Paramount might settle that. And by the way, they happened to have Paramount Skydance merger that's sitting before the Trump administration, but suggesting that those things are connected Paramount might settle that and by the way they happen to have Paramount Skydance merger that's sitting before the Trump administration but suggesting that those things are connected would be untoward so I wouldn't do that. And Larry Ellison just in the office just for a huge happen to be there. So if we see the biggest media organizations in the country and their corporate overlords

preemptively caving to the Trump administration and settling lawsuits they could have won. That is a very scary signal about, uh, press coverage and fighting for the first amendment, right? To cover the white house in the second administration. And we need to keep an eye on that. Well, it's like you talk, you talk about like, uh, you know, we need, we need to be nimble. We need to be out there.

Like meeting here. Well, there's that, but then it's also like journalists themselves are struggling to cover all of this. And so now you have the president of the United States who is lying and making shit up and completely misconstruing his various policy proposals on a daily basis. And if anybody covering him slips up for even one fucking second, he's going to be the president suing these people into oblivion while they're where their where their parent companies have business for the government. It's terrifying. Yeah, the media point is really important also, because sometimes I feel like all of

us are having, you know, there's like a 500,000 of us that are all having a conversation about strategy with each other. And then there's like a country of 300 million people, most of whom are who are paying attention and can barely get some of this information from new sources that are now under intense pressure. And so like one of the things we all have to think about is not just making sure that our other tweeters and other Democrats are saying the exact right message,

but like, you know, getting it out there to more people. Got to put some kind of message at the bottom of the Costco samples. Got to get creative people. That's a bad idea. We can shop at Costco. Yeah, we can still go to Costco. Got to get messages into those rotisserie chickens. Get the messages to the chickens. We've dealt with this guy for a decade and Trump's like, uh, we gave $50 million to Hamas for condoms and then they use the condoms as bombs. It's completely made up because some dork over at Doge, she was 19 years old and has the Twitter handle big balls 69 420 misread a spreadsheet and didn't realize this funding

was going to like Mozambique or something. And then the response though is like factcheck.org has Trump administration makes unsupported claims about 50 million for condoms to Gaza. It's like, oh my God. And then we're done. And then It's like, oh my God. And then we're like, what's breaking through? None of this is breaking through. And then I listened to Sarah Longwell's focus group

and then I listened to Sarah Longwell's focus group this weekend and she's got first time Trump voters, Biden and Trump voters, asking them how they're thinking about Trump. And they're like Tommy said earlier, like they're all always taking an action on stuff, he's taking an action. And then- Like he promised Hamas is raw dogging again. Promise made, promise kept.

No, one of the people in the book screen, he's like, I haven't heard much, but I heard about these condoms that they're spending. He's like, I'm glad they're cutting all that. The condoms for Hamas, that's crazy. And I'm like, oh, that fucking broke through. That broke through. Of course it did. Anyway, we got a lot of work. And Twitter's accessible, the Elon fluffers are just out in force, they're everywhere,

they're attacking everything. Yeah, no, I really, yeah, thank you, Sequoia management partner, no, I know you know a lot about the federal government, fucking asshole. Alright. Deleted the app to download the New York Times cooking app instead. That's good.

We may live in a fascist state, but I'm making Mary me chicken. And you know what? You're making it with ingredients. No tariffs. That's right. No tariffs. Thank you, Mr. Trump.

Thank you, Mr. Trump. Trump. All right. When we come back, love it. Talk to the deputy director of the OMB and the Obama administration and director of the national economic council under Joe Biden, Brian Deese. And just so you all know, we talked in between the Mexican tariffs being paused and the Canadian

tariffs being paused, but we talked about it both as a negotiating tactic and what it might look like if these tariffs are ultimately implemented, including the Chinese tariffs, which as of this recording are still, we believe, going into effect. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. We often hear about the red flags we should avoid, but what if we focus more on looking for green flags in friends and partners? If you're not sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags, actively practice them in your relationships,

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He's the former deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget and director of the National Economic Council under President Biden. Brian Deese, welcome back to the pod. Thanks for having me. As of this recording Monday afternoon, 25% tariffs are set to go into effect against a broad range of Canadian imports with the exception of a 10% tariff on Canadian oil. Though there are last minute negotiations that could push this off another month, there will also be a 10% tariff on Chinese imports.

Trump and Mexican president, Claudia Scheinbaum, negotiated a deal to delay terrorists by at least a month against Mexico, with Mexico promising to send more troops to the southern border and Scheinbaum securing some sort of a promise over guns flowing south from the United States into Mexico. Let's start with this.

I woke up this morning and I just opened my phone and I just checked the Dow. I don't I don't live my life yoked what the Dow does but I was like are we in an economic crisis or not? And what I saw was that the markets dipped a little bit and then upon the news that Trump had this deal with Scheinbaum they went back up. Does that tell you that there is still a kind of belief that Trump is just negotiating that even as we're recording this he's threatening these massive and terrible tariffs but is ultimately just in some way negotiating? Look, I think a lot of the market reaction can be explained by exactly that which is initially the market thought he wasn't serious and he wouldn't do this and then the market thought well he will threaten these tariffs but he won't actually put them into effect. And now I think there is still a belief that he may put them into effect, but they'll only be in effect for a short

period of time because this is negotiating. All of that is to say, though, the right way to think about the impact is not what happens to the Dow today. It's what happens to the prices that people pay on typical things for no apparent reason. The Wall Street Journal called this the dumbest trade war in history and it's one of the few times I think that the Wall Street Journal actually understated it. This is all self-imposed and so even if the impact is only for a short period of time or only muted, we're still the end result is people are paying more for no apparent reason. So let's talk about what the impact could be. Again, these tariffs against Canada

may go in effect tomorrow, they may not, but if they did, some estimates found that they could cost a typical household about $2,600, but that's an average. It'll affect certain goods more than other goods. And because of the unique interdependence of Canada and the United States, it would affect some parts of the country more than others.

What do you think the, I wanna to just divide it half. First, what would be the biggest price impacts? And then I want to talk about the broader economic impact. Sure. So, start the price impacts on the the goods that we rely most on Canada and Mexico for. So, first some vegetables. Super Bowl time, avocados. Most of our fruits and vegetables we import from Mexico, the price of those things is going to go up by about 25%. Gas at the pump.

There are certain regions of the country, particularly the Midwest, that rely on imported petroleum products from Canada. Most estimates are that you'd see a 50-cent increase in gas in the Midwest, probably more like 25 cents across the country, but it could be higher in particular places. And then the kind of typical goods that you see walking down a target aisle or a Walmart aisle. So iPhones, toasters, consumer electronics are all going to go up by in the ballpark

of 25 percent because when a tariff is applied, it's not just that the importer pays the tariff, it's that the competitors then raise their prices to match those. And so the consumer ends up paying most of that. So in terms of practical and practically, most of what you buy, if you're walking down the grocery store or you're walking through a Target or Walmart, the prices are going to go up. The first order impact is typical consumers pay more on things like groceries and gas and consumer electronics. The second order impact is if that actually gets washed away by a stronger dollar, then it hurts American manufacturers, which is why I saw a cartoon trying to say what is

Trump actually doing, where Trump was pissing into a fan and it was spitting all back into his face. And usually that's sort of evocative, but actually I think that's not an unreasonable way of thinking about what's going on here. It's hard to avoid this coming back in and being self-defeating in some way or shape or form.

So then what could be the job impact? So that's the kind of the consumer price impacts, but there's a lot of interdependence between so some of the goods that could be tariffs are products that are brought down into the US to be part of domestic manufacturing here. Who are people who what jobs are at risk because of this of these tariffs? Look, the place I'm most worried about is the auto industry, because the auto industry is incredibly dependent on the interrelationship with Canada and Mexico. A lot of the parts that go

into making a car are produced in Canada and they go back and forth over the border. Anyone who lives in Michigan or has been up in Detroit, the Windsor Bridge, you know, the auto industry is essentially one industry that operates across a border. So to build a, you know, to build a typical, if GM is building a typical car, parts might go back and forth across that border five, six, seven different times. And so the industry right now is really freaking out and saying, we've never had to grapple with the question of, is a part going to be tariffed, a steering wheel going to be tariffed four or five different times as it goes across the border how is this

going to work and by the way if Canada retaliates and starts to cut off access to parts that's going to have a broader cascading impact on our company's ability to actually produce vehicles in the first place in the previous Trump term there was a lot of big talk on imposing these kinds of broad tariffs, but he ultimately did a set of targeted or more targeted tariffs. The Biden administration actually left some of those tariffs in place and then imposed a bunch on their own. There was a tariff on electric cars, batteries, certain metals, certain minerals, even certain

kinds of cranes. Can you talk about the difference in the logic between the Biden administration's approach to tariffs and the Trump administration's approach to tariffs? Yeah, to shorthand it, it's a difference between strategic and stupid. So there is a real rationale, an economic and national security rationale to use tariffs.

If other countries are explicitly, either illegally or unfairly, contorting their own industry in an effort to try to undermine American industry in areas where we have a strategic, uh, strategic stake. Things where we need components that go into building planes and tanks that support our middle military. Things like critical minerals that are actually strategic and China could have a stranglehold on different supply chains. In those areas you can actually see a country like China is actually taking a legal action to try to subsidize its industry in a way that could then undercut US industry. It makes a lot of

sense to actually step in and say no we're going to make sure that the US industry has a way to actually build and scale its own capabilities. But to put the strategic versus stupid in context, the total amount of goods that the Biden administration put tariffs on, these strategic tariffs, was about $18 billion. You compare that to what's on the table right now with Trump, $1.4 trillion. So people say it's a difference between a scalpel and a sledgehammer. This is like a scalpel versus like a whole army versus a sledgehammer, just hitting anything that you could possibly hit. And so even to give the first Trump administration some credit under, you know, Bob

Lighthizer and others, the ultimate approach they took to China was more calibrated. It wasn't across the board. It didn't hit everything. It exempted consumer goods. This approach is literally saying, we'll just put a tariff on anything. Even if the end result is you're pissing into a fan, it's all coming back. There's just, there's not a strategic rationale behind the approach. So Trump bullies Columbia. He gets a quick win.

Uh, the damage to our reputation is a safe and reliable trading partner takes a hit, but that's like very hard to measure. Trump is now obviously starting in Canada, he's starting in China, he's starting in Mexico. He's also today was talking about the European Union. What happens if the US tries to fight these different trade wars on multiple fronts? And how could not just one country independently, but how could countries together respond in a way that harms our economy, that harms our influence on the world stage?

So we benefit when countries believe that when we say something, we're going to do it. And that's a little bit of the problem with this strategy of constantly threatening everybody with tariffs, right? Is either one of two things happens. One, you threaten it and then pull it back. It seems like what's happened with Scheinbaum even today. The 25% tariff is not going to go into effect today with Mexico, but maybe it will go into effect a month from now. You do that enough times and people start to question whether the United States will actually do what it says. Or you follow through and the bullying tactic causes

other people to recognize, well, if you're going to bully us, we're going to go and find other friends. We're going to go and not rely on the United States anymore. And across time, what that means is when it comes to security partnerships, when it comes to economic partnerships, countries just aren't going to be as willing or set a higher price to actually partner with the U.S. And look, at the end of the day, we should be prepared to stand up more aggressively when countries are cheating and breaking the rules. And a lot of that is really a story about China. And we should be more aggressive in saying

China uses all of its tools of economic statecraft to actually flood markets like steel in the US to undercut our capacity. We should be more vocal about that. We shouldn't be apologized for saying we're going to stand up for American interest. The challenge is when you're doing that on multiple fronts and not distinguishing between a country like China, where you can identify multiple instances where they're doing this, and Canada, where it's really hard to put like a sentence, let alone a paragraph together of saying, what is it that we're actually so concerned about

or afraid about in that context? You know, when the US stops differentiating between this, then you start to put us in a position where we're not gonna have many friends or allies around the world. Is there any part of you that sees how Trump is kind of wielding America's economic power and think, obviously, this is dangerous, this is reckless, this is careless, but there are

ways in which Democrats were not as aggressive as they should have been, that President Biden wasn't as aggressive as he shouldn't have been? Is there some middle distance between Trump's kind of careless and stupid wielding of America's power and our? Kind of debt not just Democrats, but a bipartisan consensus That's been kind of a little bit more deferential and a little bit more built around consensus. You look in the first instance I don't think we should denigrate a number of the goals that President Trump and his team are putting forward They're talking about wanting to have more, you know sustained strong economic growth this country. We should be shooting for that. My concern is not that goal. It's just I don't think that the policies are going to get us there. He wants, he's talking

about building manufacturing capacity, industrial capacity here in the U.S. Right goal. The quality, the question is, is any of this actually going to get there? So I think we should be, we should be quite clear about saying these are goals that we share. The question is how do we get there? And yes, I think that there are a number of places where we need to ask ourselves really hard questions about are we using the tools we have to stand up as aggressively as we can for the interests of American workers, American consumers, and where our economy is going to go over the medium term. But I also think we have to maintain this view

that there is smart and stupid here, right? There is a line between saying, just because we have a tool, we're going to, you know, bang away at it, versus, you know what, like, putting more costs on typical consumers right now at the grocery store and the gas pump is just not a good idea. And so we're gonna, you know, we're gonna stand up and say, we could, we could be using these

tools more aggressively, but to the end of actually, for example, having an auto industry that actually gets competitive again, and that actually competes with China, that would be a goal worth actually fighting for. That would be a goal worth actually fighting for. That would be a goal worth using our tools more effectively for. Before we let you go, you were the deputy director of OMB. Elon Musk has basically helped lead a hostile takeover. OMB was a source of that federal funding freeze memo that sowed a bunch of chaos last week. What is your reaction to what's happening at OMB and what is the power that

OMB has if it is not restrained by either deference to political impact or deference to other agencies? So, the power that OMB has within the executive branch and under the constitution is quite limited. Congress is responsible for appropriating money and the executive branch and under the constitution is quite limited. Congress is responsible for appropriating money, and the executive branch must follow the laws that Congress passes. Danielle Pletka Very quaint, yeah. Michael S. Lauer Exactly. But well, but I think we're gonna come back to this, which is an OMB

is responsible for them executing those strategies on behalf of the executive branches that were appropriated funds. And yes, I hear what you're saying is quaint, but at the same time, ultimately, I think what we saw with the funding freeze is where this is going, which is notwithstanding some of the bluster. It is actually the case that legally, the executive branch cannot both spend money that Congress has not appropriated and it can't fail to spend money when congress has said so i think we're gonna have a big we're gonna have a set of fights on this and this is going to get some of this is going to get hashed out in the courts but look i think having worked at omb and having felt the constraints of uh of the fact that

you know you can't violate uh the uh the anti-Deficiency Act or the Empowerment Act, even if there may be some impulse at some point to say, boy, it would be great if we could stop that. I think that, you know, I am, I believe that Congress is going to step in because one of the few roles that Congress actually cherishes in this context is they do have the power of the purse and without that it changes fundamentally you know some some pretty big tenants of our constitutional system yes i like that i didn't move itself a bad into o and b

uh... to go hardcore for the record we worked a lot of that's the weekend so that uh... uh... at and only through the financial crisis in government shutdowns in the lake there are uh... there extraordinarily talented professionals who uh... why At OMB, through the financial crisis and government shutdowns and the like, there are extraordinarily talented professionals who I certainly worked hand in hand with over the weekend many times during my government service. If you were hoping Democrats were out there saying one thing about the tariffs, about the trade war, what would that one thing be?

Why would we want consumers to pay more at the gas bump and more at the grocery store and more for their iPhones and their consumer electronics when we're not achieving anything as a country? Brian Deese, so good to see you. Thanks for doing this. And I know you worked hard. I worked with you at the time. I worked with you when you were not in that role,

but when you were at NEC and you were always, you always were so tired looking. God, you always looked exhausted. That old nickname, nights and weekends love it. I think that's what we called you. All right, this interview's over. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Before we go, two quick things. Love It or Leave It has some great shows coming up out here. This week, Love It will be at the Dynasty Typewriter

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